


Hold Your Breath While You're Safe

by Gruoch



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ben Parker's looming specter, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt/Comfort, So much trauma, Sort Of, Tony's winging it, and not always succeeding, brief descriptions of violence/gore, but there is love in suffering also, emotionally constipated man has a heart, mentoring teenage superheroes is hard, so many regrets, trauma response, we give credit for trying, with great responsibility comes festering guilt complexes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 14:04:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16874241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gruoch/pseuds/Gruoch
Summary: When the kid shows up out of the blue at Tony’s Midtown penthouse looking like he’s just been rolling around on the floor of an abattoir, Tony is surprised. But he isn’tsurprised. This kind of thing is an unfortunate inevitability in their line of work, after all.





	Hold Your Breath While You're Safe

When the kid shows up out of the blue at Tony’s Midtown penthouse looking like he’s just been rolling around on the floor of an abattoir, Tony is surprised. But he isn’t _surprised_. This kind of thing is an unfortunate inevitability in their line of work, after all.

So he isn’t surprised but he is completely unprepared for dealing with it, which is not the same thing and which feels, as both a futurist and veteran of this whole screwy superhero business, like the greater sin. It will be one regret among many that Tony will have about this night. He’s starting to collect a lot of regrets concerning the kid, regrets and worries and monstrous, many-headed fears. He spends long, dogtooth hours of the night endlessly revisiting and anatomizing them. He engineers multi-million dollar suits stocked to the gills with safety protocols in a futile attempt to assuage them. He gives these protocols cutesy, amusing names— _baby monitor, training wheels_ —like he doesn’t notice the grey creeping steadily through his goatee and the deepening lines around his eyes. He has moments these days where he actually feels sympathy for his father, god help him.

And yet he still failed to prepare for this eventuality. Maybe because it hits at places a little too personal, a little too raw and intimate to expose easily, even to the kid. _Especially_ to the kid, who still looks at Tony like he’s a man worth admiring, like he’s a man who has all the answers, and as much as the kid can be a general pain-in-the-ass, Tony finds himself wanting to maintain that illusion for reasons he can’t quite explain even to himself. It’s a slightly selfish motive, to be sure, but Tony has been able to convincingly lie to himself that he’s just protecting the kid. Until tonight.

It’s around two A.M. when it happens, and Tony should be upstairs in bed with Pepper but instead he’s in the penthouse’s small lab, a few fingers too deep in a bottle of Scotch and many hours short on sleep, trying to wrestle nanites into submission. There’s a soft _tap-tap_ at the far wall of windows that he initially misses, the sound drowned out by the music he has blasting through the room, until FRIDAY cuts the speakers unbidden. 

The pitch into sudden silence momentarily disorients him in his less-than-sober state. He blinks dumbly up at the ceiling, wondering if maybe his A.I.’s have gotten a little _too_ good at learning and performing petulance, until the _tap-tap_ comes again. He spins his chair around and squints towards the far end of the room. When he spies the little red-and-blue figure clinging to the glass of the window, he launches himself up so quickly he knocks his chair over. He’s across the room in seconds and then he’s opening the window wide enough to haul the kid through.

“What the fuck?” he asks by way of greeting once Peter is safely inside, but he doesn’t wait for an answer because the lights of the lab reveal swathes of dark stains on the kid’s suit. The sight has Tony stone-cold sober in an instant. He grabs at Peter, running his hands down the kid’s arms and sides, searching for some catastrophic stab wound or gunshot entry point, because _Jesus_ , there is _so much_ blood, the kid is absolutely covered in it—

“It’s not mine,” Peter says, shrugging out from under Tony’s groping hands. He reaches up and pulls his mask off. His face is ghostly white under the cool lab lights and his eyes are red-rimmed, but he appears remarkably calm and composed for someone who looks like they’ve just stepped off the set of some egregiously gory slasher flick. 

“It’s not mine,” he says again. “The blood—it’s not mine.”

This pronouncement does surprisingly little to calm the rapid thrum of Tony’s heart, but it at least unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Okay. Okay,” he manages to say, a little breathlessly. “You’re not hurt?”

The kid shakes his head, his mouth pressed into a tight line.

Tony closes his eyes for a second, certain he can actually feel the sudden change in his blood pressure. “Okay. Good. Great. You gonna tell me what happened?”

Peter takes a shaky breath, but when he starts he sounds as calm as he looks. “Yeah. I, um. I heard these guys fighting in an alleyway. Five of them. Just—yelling and stuff, about money. I think maybe they were drunk, or—it doesn’t matter. They were fighting. So I go over, you know, just in case things escalate and...” He stops a moment, swallows hard. “And right as I get there, a gun goes off. One of the guys goes down, the rest run. I let them go, ‘cause I can see this guy bleeding all over the place. Like—like a fountain. So I go to help him. I’m—I called 911 and I’m trying to stop him from bleeding, but it’s—there’s _so much_ of it, and I try asking him his name but he can’t tell me ‘cause they shot him right here” —the kid touches a hand to the base of his throat—“and he’s—he was choking on all the blood, it was in his mouth and nose and he was choking, and by the time the ambulance got there it was too late. He was dead.”

Peter looks away at that part, staring off into some far corner of the room, his lower lip tucked under his teeth. There is a beat of silence while they both grapple with the enormity of it all.

“Hey, you did everything right, you understand me?” Tony says finally, grasping Peter by the shoulders. He can feel little tremors seizing up the kid’s body and he realizes belatedly that what he took for composure might in fact be shock. “You did exactly what you were supposed to do.”

The kid nods once, but he looks distracted, like he’s not really hearing what he’s being told.

“Maybe if I’d got there a little sooner,” Peter murmurs, the rest of the statement left unspoken.

“Yeah, maybe,” Tony agrees, because there’s no point in lying about it. “Or maybe not. That’s the thing about maybe. You don’t have to beat yourself up over it.” Which might just be the most hypocritical thing he’s ever said. “You need to sit down? You’re shaking.”

“I’m just cold,” Peter replies, sniffing wetly. He rubs the heel of his hand across his cheek and leaves a smear of rusty red behind. “‘Cause of...because I’m all wet.”

“Let’s go upstairs,” Tony says, taking the kid by the arm and gently steering him towards the elevator, because he’s not sure Peter can handle the stairs. “Get you out of that suit and cleaned up.”

Peter is silent as he lets himself be lead from the elevator to the guest suite, which Tony finds a little unnerving considering that this is a kid who usually can’t shut the hell up for more than a few seconds at a time. Tony ushers him into the bathroom, closing the door behind them and then turning the shower on as hot as it will go, letting clouds of warm steam fill the room, because Peter is visibly shivering now.

“I think I need to throw up,” the kid says weakly, and Tony counts it as a small blessing that he managed to hold that back until they got to the bathroom.

Tony flips the lid of the toilet up and presses down on Peter’s shoulders to get him to kneel. “Have at it.”

The kid’s retching up his guts as soon as his knees touch the floor, and then he spends several more minutes dry heaving. The tears come once the gagging finally stops, quietly, the kid’s shoulders shaking and his face turned away from Tony.

Tony leans against the vanity and gives him a minute before reaching down and tugging him upright. 

“Come on, kid, you’re alright,” he says, not unkindly. 

“Sorry,” Peter mumbles. He goes to rub at his face again, only this time he remembers the blood on his hands and stops, taking a shuddering breath. “Sorry. I just—I keep thinking…” He trails off again, clearly overwhelmed.

“So don’t think about it right now,” Tony says—and _Jesus_ , could he be any worse at this? “Get out of that suit and into the shower so you can wash all this mess off. Leave it on the floor and I’ll take care of it.”

Tony stands in the doorway facing out towards the bedroom to give the kid some privacy while he undresses, waiting until he hears the shower door close before turning back to collect the suit. It’s tacky and stiff with coagulating blood that flakes off onto Tony’s hands, leaving him feeling a little sick himself. He ends up balling the suit up and tossing it into the far corner of the bathroom to be dealt with later, when all of this feels less like a crisis.

“I’ll be right back,” Tony tells Peter. “I’m gonna get you something to wear.”

Tony heads down the hall toward his own bedroom, stopping in the powder room to wash the dried blood off his hands, scrubbing them until the skin is red and raw. He feels jittery now from the aftershocks of adrenaline and he grips the sides of the sink until his knuckles turn white, taking a few deep breaths to collect himself before continuing down the hall.

Pepper stirs in the bed when he enters their room, lifting her head from the pillow to squint sleepily at him. “Tony? Are you actually planning on coming to bed tonight?”

“Yeah, honey, in a little bit,” Tony promises, rifling through his drawers for a t-shirt and sweatpants. “Kid’s here. He got into some trouble and he’s a little shaken up. I’m gonna have him stay overnight. Do me a favor and shoot a message to his aunt. Tell her...”

He flounders, unable to come up with a reasonable excuse, his mental capacity worn down to a kind of exhausted static.

“I’ll think of something,” Pepper says, coming to the rescue. Tony would crawl into the bed and kiss her, if he didn’t just have another man’s blood all over his hands.

“Is he alright?” she asks.

“He’ll be fine,” Tony replies, and despite everything he’s pretty sure that’s true. The kid’s already been primed for handling life’s shitbag full of dirty tricks and he’s made it through greater tragedies in his young life in more or less one piece, after all. There’s no reason to think this will be any different. Just another heaping helping of guilt, Tony thinks. Good thing he’s young and healthy. Better to bear all that extra weight pressing down on his shoulders.

This might be the kid’s first time losing someone in his unofficial-official capacity as Spider-Man, but this isn’t Peter’s first time, not really, and some selfish part of Tony is grateful for that. It won’t be the last time either, which unexpectedly grieves Tony on some level he hasn’t experienced before. Even for a man who spends a great deal of time and energy obsessing over future threats, the catalogue of potential harm and catastrophe lurking in the vastness of the universe feels suddenly overwhelming in its scope, all its cruelties drawn tightly into humming hyper-focus. He wonders, distantly, if this is how his mother felt every time he trundled off into an unpredictable world, tapping into some instinctual, universal fear shared by all adults who care about the well-being of the children entrusted to them. The thought is enough to get him briefly, painfully choked up before he brushes it aside and heads back down to the guest suite, clothes tucked under his arm.

Tony can hear the shower still running when he stands outside the bathroom door, and he gives a perfunctory knock before opening it and heading in. The air inside is thick with steam, the glass walls of the shower opaque with it.

“I brought you some clothes,” Tony says briskly, setting them down on the top of the vanity. “And the guest bed is made up. You’re gonna stay here tonight, alright? I’ll deal with your aunt.”

He pauses, listening to the water running and the silence that answers him.

“Can I get some kind of verbal confirmation so I know you haven’t passed out in there and brained yourself on the tile?” he asks finally.

“Okay,” Peter replies quietly.

“Thank you,” Tony says. “Just...take as long as you need to.”

Tony waits in the hallway outside the bedroom door, sitting on the floor and rubbing his hands over his knees, trying to think of the right words to say that will fulfill whatever it is the kid expects of him. Because the kid is expecting _something_. There’s a reason he came here to Tony tonight instead of going home. Only Tony doesn’t have a single fucking clue what that could be, no idea what the kid wants from him, no roadmap to follow. He has nothing to offer from his own experience with this kind of thing except a laundry list of self-destructive coping mechanisms that he’s determined to avoid passing on to Peter. Anything else he could say will reek of hypocrisy. _Do as I say, not as I do._ He’s tried that one on the kid before with predictably disastrous results. Has any fifteen-year-old anywhere in the world at any time in history bought that little bit of drivel?

He tries to envision what his father would have said to him, if Howard Stark had been the kind of man who sat his son down and offered advice or comfort or just a human fucking presence, but even as a man of ample imagination Tony finds himself drawing a blank. His father likely would have handed him a glass of bourbon, maybe told him to man up. It’s a non-solution that’s tempting and repulsive at the same time and absolutely not what a kid like Peter needs. Tony knows that much, at least.

He thinks back to all the files he had pulled when the kid had just been an intriguing little blip on his radar. He’s read the newspaper articles about the plane crash that removed Peter’s parents from his life before he was old enough to really make memories of them, and the police reports about his uncle, killed in a mugging gone wrong, life gushing out in a cold alley while the kid watched, helpless. Not even front page news in this city overrun with human miseries. But Tony’s also read the stuff not available for public consumption. He might dress up as a superhero but he’d be the first to admit that his morals can be a little loose and his respect for other people’s privacy nonexistent. He knows about the underpaid school counselors and the rotating roster of social workers and the bottom-of-the-barrel therapist, a whole ragged team of people brought in to ferry the kid through the aftermath—at least for a few months until the survivor benefits and insurance money ran dry. Then it’s back out into the big wide world with you. _Sayonara, kid, here’s the tattered remains of your innocence and here’s your emotional baggage, get a good grip because it sure is heavy and you got a long way to carry it yet. Good luck out there._

It should make Tony feel better, really. He’s only one man and he has no business doing this, but the standards have been set so low. He feels vaguely nauseated instead. Maybe he’s the one who should be downing the glass of bourbon and being told to man up. He made the choice to seek the kid out and interfere in his life, after all. He made the commitment to take on that responsibility. And if it’s turned out to be a little heavier than he anticipated, a little more complicated—well, that’s his cross to bear.

He hears the bathroom door finally open and the sound of sheets rustling together in the bedroom. He waits a minute or two longer, tapping his fingers restlessly against his thigh, and then he gets up. He knocks softly at the bedroom door before opening it. The kid is lying in bed, the comforter pulled up close under his chin, still looking a little hollow-eyed and ghostlike.

“You need anything?” Tony asks awkwardly. “Glass of water maybe?”

Peter shakes his head, burrowing deeper into the comforter.

“Can I...” Tony makes a vague gesture towards the bed. “Can I come sit down for a minute?”

Peter says nothing, and Tony takes the absence of a negative response as permission. He goes over and perches on the edge of the bed, clearing his throat. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” the kid murmurs completely unconvincingly, fiddling with a non-existent thread along the seam of the comforter.

Tony clears his throat again, shifting on the bed. “Listen, what happened tonight—you really did do everything right,” he says. “It’s just. Sometimes that’s not enough. You can’t control every little thing or account for—for fate or whatever the fuck happens. This is—it was going to happen eventually, you know that, right? It does for all of us. It has for me. You’re gonna lose some.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better or something?” the kid asks, and there’s something hard and angry in his voice. 

“No,” Tony admits. “No. I’m just letting you know that’s how things are. And it— _hurts_ , I know it does, but this wasn’t your fault, not this time. You didn’t get that guy killed. You can’t hold yourself personally accountable for something like this.”

“You’re wrong,” Peter says, quietly but so fierce. “It should be personal. Every time. If it’s not—if it’s not, then you’re not doing it right.”

Tony squeezes his hands into fists, grimacing. There’s an ache in the pit of his stomach. “You keep thinking like that and you’re gonna burn out before you even graduate college. _Hard_. Trust me. I don’t want that for you.”

“I don’t care,” the kid says, digging his fists into his eyes. He might be crying again, Tony isn’t sure and he can’t bear to look too closely. “I don’t care. I just...I’m tired right now, that’s all.”

“Okay, so maybe you should think about taking a break,” Tony says, even though they both know that it will never happen. The kid won’t stop, can’t stop—just like Tony can’t. Still, he feels like he has to at least say the words aloud and give the kid permission.

Peter shakes his head, looking almost physically pained by the suggestion. “I _can’t_.”

“Sure you can,” Tony insists uselessly. “If this is too much—if you don’t want to do this anymore, even for a little while, that’s alright. I promise it will be okay.”

“ _No_. No, you just—you don’t get it,” Peter says angrily. “I _have_ to do this.”

Tony gives him a grim little smile. “Yeah, kid, I _do_ get it, believe it or not, and you don’t _have_ to do anything.”

“No, you weren’t there,” the kid says, his breathing ragged. “ _No one_ helped. Why wouldn’t anyone help me?”

“I don’t know,” Tony says slowly. “Maybe…some people hear gunshots and they see Spider-Man, and they think they don’t need to get involved.”

“No, not tonight. With Ben,” Peter says, his voice breaking. “There were people walking by the alley. I could see them. They were _right there_. I was—I _begged_ someone to help me, and no one would stop. If someone had just stopped to help me, maybe he wouldn’t have…Maybe he’d still be here. Why wouldn’t anyone stop to help me?”

Tony runs a hand down his face, feeling old and tired, struggling to think of what to say. He has nothing to offer the kid, he realizes, no explanation. Even if he did have one, he doubts it would change anything.

“I don’t know,” he says again. “But that wasn’t your fault, either.”

“You don’t know _anything_ ,” Peter says, sounding beyond exhausted. He rolls over onto his belly, turning his face away from Tony. “Can you stop talking now? Please. I don’t want you to talk anymore.”

“Yeah. Yeah I can do that, if that’s what you want,” Tony says, feeling like he’s failed the kid in some massive way. That sense of failure will stay with him for a long time after this night.

Peter buries his face in the crook of his arm and makes a muffled sound that might be a sigh or a sob. Tony hesitates a moment, and then he reaches out, pressing his hand flat between Peter’s shoulder blades, feeling the shudder of the kid’s lungs beating like bird wings against his palm. He sits on the bed and lets his hand rest there like that for a long time, until he feels Peter’s breathing even out and slow, and then he lets it rest a while longer. Just in case the kid wakes up later, so he won’t be alone. Tony can get that much right, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also on [Tumblr](https://groo-ock.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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